Canada’s special envoy to Myanmar, Bob Rae, says a report that Facebook released showing the social-media platform was used to spread hate speech and violence in the country is just the start of a problem he believes will continue.

Myanmar fell into crisis in August 2017, after a militant group of the Rohingya population attacked as many as 30 Myanmar police and security posts in the Rakhine State. The Rohingya are a majority Muslim group native to the country. Since the attack, they’ve faced an aggressive response from Myanmar’s military. It’s estimated that more than 9,000 Rohingya were killed in the following month, while thousands of homes burned and more than 700,000 Rohingya were forced to flee the country, many to neighbouring Bangladesh, where they remain. Myanmar’s government has placed blame on the Rohingya. The United Nations has labelled the event a genocide.

Anti-Rohingya sentiment and other hate messages were spread on Facebook, spurring the conflict. The company admits this in a post on its website about the study it commissioned Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) to conduct.

“The report concludes that, prior to this year, we weren’t doing enough to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence,” said Alex Warofka, a product-policy manager at Facebook. “We agree that we can, and should, do more.”

Rae, the former interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and premier of Ontario, was appointed to the position of special envoy to Myanmar in October 2017. He visited the country twice to observe the persecution of the Rohingya and to report back what he believed Canada could do in response to the humanitarian and political crisis. He recommended the Canadian government provide $600 million over four years to help those affected by the violence. The government agreed to give $300 million in aid over three years.

Rae told iPolitics he observed Facebook being used in similar ways to what BSR observed, adding he doesn’t think the company was equipped to handle the problem.

“I think the evidence is pretty strong that Facebook really had no capacity and no particular knowledge or idea what was going on, and it’s only in the last while that they began to develop this capacity,” Rae said.

For a large part of Myanmar’s population of 20 million, Facebook “is the Internet,” the report found. Therefore, it’s their main source of information.

As well as being a platform for hate speech and the incitement of violence, the study says Facebook has also “substantially increased opportunities for freedom of expression, assembly, and association in Myanmar.”

The country has historically restricted free speech. Its Internet policies were only loosened in 2011.

“Of course, many people might think, ‘Well that’s a wonderful thing, because it means society is becoming more open, and we’ll become more liberal and tolerant as a result,’ but, in fact, the evidence is quite strong that Facebook was the platform of choice,” Rae said. “And as that became clear, it was very widely used in the propaganda war, on all sides.”

For example, the Buddhist monk Wirathu — who’s been dubbed both the “Buddhist bin Laden” and the “Burmese bin Laden” — was banned from preaching publicly in Myanmar because he habitually expressed anti-Muslim sentiment. He continued to spread anti-Muslim rhetoric on his Facebook page, until the site removed it in January.

In response to the BSR study, Facebook published an explanation of how it hopes to limit violence-inducing speech in the future: It’s hired a team of 99 Burmese-speakers to review content on the site and to enforce its content policies, and has also begun publishing data on hate speech posted to the site.

“We want Facebook to be a place where people can express themselves freely and safely around the world,” Warofka said.

Bangladesh and Myanmar have agreed to begin the repatriation of the Rohingya. But a group of more than 40 non-governmental organizations released a statement today saying the action is “premature” and, ultimately, too dangerous.

Rae thinks the effect that hate speech has on social media to spur violence has only just begun.

“I think it’s an ongoing issue. I don’t think it’s just in Myanmar. I think the question is: Do we have the ability to monitor, the ability to fully understand how these sites — how these methods of communications — really work, and the speed of their impact? I think that’s something (society hasn’t) even begun to understand fully,” he said.

Although Rae was appointed special envoy for a limited term, he said he considers himself the government’s point man on the crisis on an “ad hoc” basis. He hopes to return to Myanmar in early 2019.